There are a number of U.S. patents that disclose electronic apparatus for printing indicia on labels for use as wire markers, some of these are restricted to hand held units and others that disclose tabletop units. Hand held label printers, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,113,293, and tabletop printers, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,266,075 and 5,078,523, include the same general combination of elements, a print head, means for feeding label media to be printed past the print head, a microprocessor, a read only memory programmed with appropriate instructions to operate the microprocessor, a random access memory, a keyboard with letter, number, and function keys for the entry of alphanumeric information and instructions concerning the indicia to be printed, and a visual display such as a light emitting diode (LED) or liquid crystal display (LCD) unit to assist the operator in using the printer. In a hand held printer, these components may all be enclosed in a single housing.
A particular type of print head employs thermal transfer printing technology. Thermal transfer printing uses a heat generating print head to transfer a pigment, such as wax, carbon black, or the like, from a thermal transfer ribbon to a label media. By using digital technology, characters are formed by energizing a sequence of pixels on the print head which in turn melts the wax or other pigment on the ink ribbon transferring the image to the label media.
Known wire marker label media comprises a series of identical fixed length labels that are attached to a carrier strip. The carrier strip is fed through the printer and legends, alphanumeric characters, and other indicia, are printed on the labels. The wire marker labels are then removed from the carrier web and slipped on, or wrapped around, the wire needing identification. As there are many types of label applications, there are many combinations of labels and carrier strips that provide labels of varying sizes, colors and formats.
In known wire marker labels, the longest string of indicia that must be printed on the wire marker label determines the shortest wire marker that can be used. In addition, the carrier strip width is typically determined by length of the wire marker. This results in a significant waste of label media when the longest string occurs infrequently, and requires a cartridge and printer to handle different carrier strip widths. Therefore, a need exists for label media that can produce wire markers that can be dynamically sized to accommodate variable length strings of indicia.